There are several systems which have previously been used to allow consumers to purchase products from their homes. A first system involves displaying individual items of merchandise to a live television audience via a cable television channel, in the format of a typical television show. Consumers contact a purchase center via telephone to order a product. One problem with this method is that the products offered, and the order and time of their offering, are controlled and preselected by the producer of the television show. Because of this preselection, consumers must watch the television when the products they want to purchase are being presented. Currently, no cable television channels allow a consumer to select which products are being viewed.
A second system involves allowing a consumer to access, using a personal computer and a modem, an "on-line" computer service. In some instances, the consumer has a printed catalog available. When the consumer accesses the service, a textual description of product offerings is presented, usually in the form of a menu. There are a few textually-based grocery home shopping services which are still active including services provided by Peapod, based in Chicago, Shoppers Express, Harvest America and U.S. Order-Scanfone. U.S. Order-Scanfone provides a printed catalog with UPC codes which can be scanned by a pen, attached to a phone, called a "Scanfone". Numerous on-line shopping services for other merchandise are also available, such as Prodigy, CompUServe, Genie Services, and Comp-U-Card. While consumers are able to order products when they want to, it is very cumbersome to sort through a large number of products in a textual format. This method has been commercially tried without much success. Commercial failures of such systems have been attributed mostly to low consumer usage (probably due to the cumbersome text-based interface) which makes such a system uneconomical.
An interactive home shopping service available over cable television, TelAction, was at one time operative around the Chicago area. This service was also unsuccessful because of its cumbersome technology and unsatisfactory rate of return consumers. Products which were offered in a typical department store, such as clothing, were offered. The system used by this service is described in numerous patents assigned to Telaction, now dissolved, including U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,792,849, 4,829,372, 4,860,123, 4,905,094, 5,113,496, 5,119,188, 5,191,410, 5,195,092, and 5,208,665 all of which are incorporated by reference. In the Telaction system, a number of video presentations, one for each product, were combined to form segments, or product groups, which are interconnected by a computer data structure, specifically a tree. This tree and the video information were stored on a video disk. There are a number of permissible paths among the video presentations, and the consumer may select which paths to follow through the video presentations. The video presentations represent different areas of a store. Each node in the network includes one or more video segments, each segment being one or more video images (still pictures) and possibly one or more audio images (audio messages). Navigation of the tree is permitted by menus, and was intended to closely resemble the experience of being in an actual store. A product file stores product information which may be presented to a consumer in order to allow the consumer to purchase a product.
A variety of services other than shopping are currently available as interactive television systems. For example, Interactive Television Systems, Inc. has a system which uses an FM radio signal primarily to transmit and run interactive games. Such a system is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,181,107 and 5,051,822.
Generally, previous home shopping services have failed because of the lack of both ease and flexibility in the selection of products. Also, the products offered were often of the type which consumers would rather buy in person, such as clothing. In order to improve the success of an interactive home shopping service, consumers must be willing to purchase the offered products at home. Also, the interface of the system should facilitate selection of a variety of offered products by allowing flexibility in selection and by providing sufficient information to enable an informed selection.